A new Netflix documentary utilizes the expertise of an Indiana University Maurer School of Law professor to help explain the legal ramifications of an extraordinary fertility fraud case.
Jody Madeira, an internationally recognized expert in fertility fraud, bioethics, and law and medicine, with a focus on reproductive endocrinology, is featured as a legal expert in Our Father. The documentary examines the case of Indianapolis doctor Donald Cline, a fertility specialist who, after a fraud investigation, was found to have used his own sperm to artificially inseminate patients in the early-to-mid 1980s.
When Jacoba Ballard took a commercially available DNA test in 2014, she was surprised to discover she had seven half-siblings. As time went on, and more and more people uploaded results of their genetic testing to online databases, the number of Ballard’s half-siblings continued to grow. Cline is believed to have biologically fathered at least 94 individuals between 1979 and 1986. Court records indicate that Cline told women he was inseminating them with sperm from medical or dental residents or medical students, never acknowledging that he was using his own sperm in the process. Ballard started connecting with her half-siblings as more and more continued to appear in genealogy results, eventually bringing a complaint to the Indiana Attorney General’s Office.
Our Father covers the ethical, moral, and legal complexities of the case. At the time the inseminations occurred, there were no laws prohibiting what Cline did. While many women argued they were raped, prosecutors were faced with a major dilemma—how do you hold someone accountable for an action, reprehensible as it may be, that wasn’t illegal when it occurred?
“When you talk about rape, there is a provision in Indiana law that says rape can include conduct which a victim doesn’t know is sexual, but the perpetrator knows is sexual,” Madeira tells the film’s producers. “And that I think is the closest charge.”
Madeira interviewed Tim Delaney, the deputy prosecutor with the grand jury division of the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office, who handled the Cline case.
Cline was eventually charged in 2016 with two counts of felony obstruction of justice, for lying during the investigation. Cline admitted to lying about his involvement in the conceptions when he pleaded guilty to both counts in 2017. He received two suspended sentences and paid a $500 fine.
That punishment, Cline’s offspring argue, was not nearly severe enough for what he did. But Madeira notes that based on the laws Delaney had to enforce, he wasn’t able to go after Cline for more severe charges. If anything, she said, the case illustrates the limits of the judicial system.
“I think we have to see Tim Delaney in which the context this was brought. He said that Indiana juries were not willing to buy rape by deception theories. The jury is going to say ‘This woman consented to insemination,’ ‘This woman wanted a child,’ and the question is always out there: Does this woman’s desire for a child legitimate Donald Cline’s deception? And unfortunately, that is a question that Tim Delaney had to weigh would enter into the minds of jurors.”
Our Father is streaming now on Netflix.
I don’t understand why the fathers that submitted specimen don’t have a case against Dr,(?) Cline. Don’t they have a legal case?
This also happened to me. I was artificially inseminated unknowingly with my doctors sperm June 1984. He told me the sperm came from Rocky Mountain Sperm bank in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He jokingly said it would be from a Medical doctor or a ski bum. A VERY similar story that was told in “Our Father” documentary. My boy/girl twins were born March 1985. My son did a Ancestry DNA test March of 2021 (a gift for his birthday) wanting to know his ethic background. He was given names of his closest relatives and he only recognized one name that was his Uncle on mothers side. He figured the others were from the donors side. When his sister saw the documentary she asked him to send the names, that was May 15, 2022. She recognized my doctors name because she also went to him for her 1st Pap exams when she was 17. She then looked up the names on Facebook and found the doctor in all the family photos. She called me emotionally distraught! The doctor has 13 of his own children and who knows how many more he could have. Incest. My son is single and dating in the same town that the doctor practiced in. What if he falls in love and has children with one of his siblings or cousin. We want it known what he did and all his patients notified. It’s the right thing to do. She called me very emotionally distraught. This has taken a toll on our family. We don’t know what to do since the doctor died in 2015. All 13 children listed in his obituary.My daughter has auto immune disease and thyroid problems, son has had trouble with asthma all his life. For this reason we would like to know his medical history. Should we contact his children and wife and let them know what he did? Do we get a lawyer?